1 THE STRAW THAT STIRS THE DRINK FOR MONTHS, Billy Hicks had asked the boys to remember the pain: the failure of not making it to Rupp Arena and the tears in that locker room the previous March. He urged them not to forget the ridicule: how opposing fans had mocked them that day, reveling in their collective failure and laughing at their disappointment. And now, with a new basketball season upon them, Hicks unearthed the past all over again, as if the boys had forgotten. "All of Kentucky rejoiced when we got beat," Hicks told them on the eve of the season. "But daggone, let's make all of Kentucky howl this year. Let's make 'em pay." As he spoke, Hicks paced before them, one hand on his hip, the other on his head. He hoped his boys were ready.
In quiet moments, huddled up with his assistant coaches in recent days, he admitted that he wasn't sure that they were. He wished they had another month to practice, another month to prepare. But there was no use hoping and wishing anymore. It was time to play, time to win. Surely, they would win. The goal for the Scott County boys was simple: They were not to lose a single game to a Kentucky basketball team all season. Kentucky was theirs. Kentucky was Cardinal country.
If they played like Hicks knew they could play, then no one would beat them. Billy Hicks was confident of that. They would win it all, every game, every time. "Hey, guys," Hicks said. "We're going to make this our state." And yet here they were just one night later, on the road, in the first game of the season, down three points with sixteen seconds to go, the undefeated year already unraveling, the boys staring at each other in the team huddle, and the opposing fans-some 1,500 strong-hollering themselves hoarse in the night. "We are Ballard!" Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap! "We are Ballard!" Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap! Friggin' Ballard. Stomping his feet and throwing his arms into the air on the sideline, Hicks could barely believe what he was seeing.
In his pregame speech two hours earlier, he had been the very portrait of calm-or as calm as he ever got-adjusting the fit of his red tie in the visitors' locker room and laying it, just so, against his blue-checkered, button-down shirt. His brown dress shoes shimmered in the lights as he stepped onto the floor in Ballard's gymnasium and his pleated beige slacks were perfectly pressed. But now it looked as if someone had set those slacks afire and that Hicks had leapt into the brown waters of the Elkhorn Creek to douse the flames. His face, smooth and creased like worn leather, burned bright red as he screamed at his boys in the final, frantic moments of the game. The veins in his neck were bulging as if pumping crude oil through his towering six-foot-four frame. And he wasn't merely sweating; Hicks was drenched, and his damp hair was disheveled from all the times he had grabbed his face in horror. "How can you be out there, guys, and not rebound?" he asked the boys during one fourth-quarter time-out, shouting in an effort to be heard over the roar of the crowd. "Every time they miss, they get the ball back.
REBOUND! " In the team huddle, with the boys' chests heaving and sweat dripping to the floor, Hicks's eyes, small and nut-brown, darted from one boy to another. He turned to Dakotah Euton, the six-foot-eight, bearded man-child who had once been ranked among the top high school players in the country, but whose stock had fallen and now was among the most vilified players in the state. He turned to Chad Jackson, the county's quiet, sometimes confounding would-be hero who was as talented as any high school basketball player when he wanted to play. There was just one problem: The coaches weren't sure that Chad, with his distant gaze and proclivity for silence, really wanted it. And then, finally, Hicks turned to his star pupil, the No. 2 ranked player in all of Kentucky, with the father cheering in the stands and the handler, a distant relative, firing off e-mails to scouts about the boy's performances and statistics. More than anyone perhaps, Billy Hicks needed this player. To win, Hicks needed Ge'Lawn Guyn.
"Ge'Lawn," Hicks pleaded, slapping the boy's backside, "c'mon now!" The boy curled up his lower lip and just nodded. * * * THE DAY FOR GE'LAWN had begun that morning with sausage and scrambled eggs-a special pregame breakfast prepared by his father. By seven o'clock on typical mornings, George Guyn was already a couple miles into his route collecting garbage in Lexington, hauling away the debris of people's lives. But today was different. Today, George was going to be there for Ge'Lawn and make that breakfast on the first day of his son's last high school basketball season. The man stood in the kitchen in his sock feet, carefully slicing breakfast sausage and stirring the eggs in a skillet. Later, he'd ferry his boy some lunch-a McDonald's Quarter Pounder-to school. Whatever Ge'Lawn needed today, he would get.
"How you feeling?" George asked as Ge'Lawn came downstairs, sleepy-eyed in the dark. Ge'Lawn yawned. The family's three dogs caged up in the living room were barking their snouts off. "Quiet!" his mama kept yelling. And one of his brothers was already on the Internet, reading the latest about Ballard, tonight's game, and his brother, who was, today, the most important Guyn of all. Between the barking and the shouting and the sizzling of the sausage in the kitchen-"Who wants some?" George called out-the house felt as if it had spun off its foundation. But Ge'Lawn-quiet and slumped over the breakfast table-paid the madness no mind. He was dressed, nearly completely, in Scott County red.
(Red Heat! Big Red Nation!) Ge'Lawn liked to give the fans who sat behind the county bench their props, turning to dap them up before he took the floor at game time. And so, of course, he was going to wear the red today. Hanging off his body was the team's warm-up suit: cozy fleece, red and black, and just a bit baggy. On his head, Ge'Lawn wore a matching red do-rag, and then, on top of that, a red fleece skier's hat with the earflaps flipped up. He couldn't be bothered to lace up his pristine white, size 13 Reeboks, and his earlobes sparkled with enough cubic zirconium to clog the bathroom sink. With hardly a word to anyone, Ge'Lawn sat at the kitchen table, waiting to be fed. The house was the best place the Guyn family (pronounced Gwinn ) had ever lived in, and still it wasn't much. You could find it in the new development of tract homes, just over the hill behind the high school, down the road past the tobacco field, and beneath the high-tension wires slicing toward Lexington.
And if you found it there, you wouldn't find much else around. Despite all the optimism with which the developers had built the subdivision a couple years earlier-CHARLESTON VILLAGE, read the sign, welcoming people to the neighborhood-the people, and the money, simply had not followed. The Guyns' was the only house on their block. Ge'Lawn's bedroom window on the second floor overlooked a ragged field, choked with weeds and the occasional children's bicycle tossed to the ground. Neighbors here were hard to find and the inside of the Guyns' home was nearly as empty as the outside. The living room was sparsely furnished and visits-from Ge'Lawn's teammates, anyway-were somewhat rare, which meant that few ever saw the empty living room, or the pile of trophies and plaques, Ge'Lawn's treasures, cascading off the mantel in the living room like a waterfall of plastic gold. There he is, all region. There he is, all district.
There he is, MVP, from the night one year ago, when he dropped twenty-nine points on soon-to-be-state-champs Holmes High with big-time college coaches in the house, watching, taking notes. The county lost that game by five, but it was a proud moment for the Guyns all the same. That was the night when people really began to take notice of their boy. And also the night, according to George, when Ge'Lawn's teammates, jealous of his son, began freezing him out. "After that game, he wouldn't never get the ball even if he was wide open," George complained to folks who would listen. "How in the hell could Coach Hicks not see that they were freezing him out?" As he stirred the eggs in the kitchen, George worried that the same thing was about to happen this season, the most important season yet, Ge'Lawn's senior year, the year he'd finally land a college scholarship, and get out of Scott County. "That's the same stuff," George said, "that's going to cost us this year." But as he delivered breakfast to four of his seven children, George did so with a smile-trying to be positive, stay positive.
It was a new season. Maybe things would be better this year. Still, it was probably worth a prayer or two. After shoveling down the eggs and sausage, the Guyn family circled up, joining hands in the living room where the furniture should have been. "Hey, be quiet!" Ge'Lawn's mama, Rebecca Guyn, shouted at the yapping dogs caged up in the corner.